Forest Booms

just some guys, camping, trippin balls

Me and my friends decided to take a camping trip up into the mountains (Colorado) and 5 of us decided to take an eighth. I got up there later than everyone else, so the other 4 had already taken the shrooms an hour before and were definitely beginning to hallucinate. So I quickly scarfed my shrooms down (they basically just tasted like cardboard, but I didn't mind) and started to play the waiting game by hitting a bowl. The other 4 went up near our tents (20 or 30 feet away from our campfire/table/homebase) while I stayed and chilled with 2 of my other buddies who weren't partaking in the shrooms but just smoking some bowls. My friend Bill left his mp3 player with Infected Mushroom playing by the campfire so I popped it in my ear, because I was beginning to feel strange.

As I stared into the campfire, watching the flames dance, a song came on that sounded sort of Native American type tribal with electronic sounds mixed in just as my friend start fanning the campfire to make it grow, producing a bunch of smoke. The whole scenario felt like some sort of futuristic yet ancient ritual, some sort of indescribable overlapping perceptions so ridiculous that I burst out laughing, only to be given strange looks. So I knew I was starting to trip so I went up to where my other buddies were at, to see how they felt. When I got there, they were all laying around on the ground, staring at the sky and nearby trees. I laid down and started to observe my surroundings growing stranger and stranger. Patterns began emerging in the ground and trees and it seemed as though the branches were growing and twisting like vines. Then I began to look at the sky, where fractals were making up the clouds. In fact, everything was becoming fractals, like the chaos theory images where things twist around and get smaller and smaller but never end.

The strangest moment of it all was feeling as though I was riding one of those fractals, turning corners as fast as I could in a desperate effort to see what was at the end of continually shrinking shapes, or if there was an end. I turned what I felt was the last corner and was greeted with an apotheosis of light and I burst out laughing again and couldn't stop myself for a few minutes. This was a strange revelation, because I felt as if I'd lived an entire lifetime and the twists and turns of the fractal and that I came face to face with the afterlife and that, in actuality, it was nothing but a laughable void, just a big joke at the very end. This was somewhat unnerving, but mostly just interesting.

For the rest of the day I wandered back and forth between the tents and the homebase, continually sitting and staring off into one direction while everything began moving/flowing/changing/shifting. One of the best was towards the end, during dusk, when I felt as if I was in a giant colliseum made of pure nature with a vaporous ocean surrounding it. I rediscovered many of the basic essentials from my previous trips (I had taken shrooms twice and acid once) which was the cyclical and balancing nature of life and universe. Also, I had that infinite feeling of identity loss where I was no one, and yet I was everything that had ever existed from the beginning of time to the end.

All in all, an intense time (like camping, har har) and I look forward to the next.